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I know this has been done before, but I got bored and felt like sharing my views on how the ladder should be run *in my opinion*.

By all means discuss, but if you want to troll go find my l2english thread instead. Thanks.

1. Activity & dropping

Teams do not drop from the ladder due to inactivity. At all* (see below: “Future improvements”).
If a team wishes to stop participating in the ladder, they should be able to cancel participation using a button in the Team Admin area. Folded teams will be removed from the ladder (automatically?).

To give teams an idea of how active potential opponents are, the current system is fine. The “activity stars” give a great indication of how active a team is. Being moved to the “inactive for xx days” bracket is also great as it is, but I propose the inactivity threshold to be at least 28 days rather than 14.

2. Challenging & scheduling

Teams should be able to challenge others without any limitations. Any team should be able to challenge any other team regardless of their position in the ladder. Teams can reject challenges if the challenger is more than xx positions above OR below them.

Non-open challenges should never have a predetermined date/time. This leaves the participating teams free to schedule for a date/time that is convenient for both teams. There will not be a match deadline and as such there will not be penalty points for “not playing soon enough”. Either team should have the ability to cancel a match (perhaps only after xx days).

Open challenges should be required to have a date/time set. Open challenges should not be allowed to be rescheduled at all. As such they have to be scheduled for at least xx days in advance.
If an open challenge cannot be played by one of the teams, the match will be defaulted and penalty points will be assigned to the team that couldn’t play. If both teams can’t play, the match will be discarded and both teams receive penalty points.
The amount of penalty points should be much higher than what it is now.

3. Insta-games

Teams should be able to submit results for games without needing to schedule/challenge beforehand at all. Score and status screenshots are also not required. This will bring ladder games closer to resembling a pcw, it will make the ladder a lot more accessible and it will greatly increase the amount of games played.

This brings in a problem though; A team could simply submit scores of a game that was never played. A simple solution to that is to put more value on requiring the opposing team to verify submitted results. Which brings in another issue; Teams may not verify results at all due to having played badly and lost (or whatever other reason).
These problems don’t have to be problems, however; The reason I have not included this paragraph under “Challenging & scheduling” is because I propose for the “insta-game” to be a completely seperate “scheduling method”. If you fear your opponent will cheat regarding submitted scores, play a scheduled game instead. Insta-games of which scores have not been verified after xx days will be discarded without penalty.

4. Ladder Admins

Two or three “ladder admins” should be recruited/assigned to run the ladder, support participating teams, and periodically evaluate the system and if necessary improve it.

5. Future improvements

Dropping: Depending on how things work out, it may be found necessary to drop teams from the ladder due to inactivity after all. However, I propose for the inactivity threshold to be at least 60 days (preferrably more, especially during seasons).

Brackets: Depending on the amount of teams that will once again participate, it may be found necessary to split the ladder in low and high brackets. The skill threshold where the bracket split occurs is something to be periodically evaluated and adjusted by the ladder admins.

good post well thought out, however I feel you have just wasted your time
http://etf2l.org/forum/league/topic-11063/?recent=200739

Quoted from Tikcus

This brings me to the fact that the ladder needs to be easier to use to quickly arrange matches.

Remove the need for scheduling, allow two teams to just post a ladder result.

Perhaps have another option in the challenge menu, which says challenge and post results or something similar, which only requires 1 clan to submit the challenge and upload the screen shots, which would just leave the other clan to click confirm on the results. Rather than the 3 steps now, challenge, wait for challenge to be accepted, arrange time, post results (granted the arrange time step can be skipped).

To make finding matches easier, I’m sure someone in this community would/could program an irc bot that sits in #etf2l or #(enter channel here), that responds to !ladder command and automatically matches teams up with others looking for a ladder match, or assuming the ladder ever gets used by the majority of teams !ladder20, !ladder40, !ladder150, where the number represents the highest placed team on the ladder you are willing to challenge (the ladder would have to become completely open for this to work).

I was kind of talking like you started the ladder afresh and had lots of signups, put them all in order of division and stick them in one big group so top div 3 can play up to mid div 2 and down to bottom div 3 or so.

Not separate groups but give teams a way of working up by beating stronger teams rather than just beating a lot of teams at a low level which is how we went up right at the beginning in my old team.

It’d be more interesting to me at least if you had to actually beat tough teams to improve and for that same thing to be true across the board you need top teams. It’d be much more popular with the support of top teams I think.

Another idea I just thought of would be you could challenge +/- different unlocks and as before have featured weeks where you get more points for playing with certain unlocks. Maybe a better way of getting some play testing done and would also allow teams who don’t want to play with unlocks to do so.

Since this thread isn’t about unlocks though just don’t make any comment about that.

Quoted from Tikcus

allow anyone to challenge anyone, but allow teams X amount of places/points higher to reject a challenge.

This is probably a better idea. If teams a certain amount lower can reject too.

Quoted from Spike Himself

[…]

I’m not particularly against this idea, but afaik the point of the ladder is to give admins an idea of where a team stands in regard to season division seeding (or well, it could be, eh) – not to add another system where they need to seed teams and deal with the never ending “omg wrong div” crap (or “wrong order in the list” as you propose it).

This is a non issue, existing teams will be placed in current divisional order, New teams start at the bottom, and can challenge higher instantly if the ladder is open – ZERO work for admins

Quoted from Spike Himself

This is only a minor issue in the beginning though – once the ladder is well underway, teams will have emerged to the position they belong. Top teams will be at the top and baddies at the bottom. And then it will be exactly as you say – you will need to beat good teams in order to climb the ranks.

In the current system you don’t need to beat good teams to be high up though, you need to play a lot and beat other teams who play a lot.

On a serious note. I wonder if anyone other than us three has read this thread.

why would you bother arranging ladder and then uploading screens and stats and have problems with mercs when you just can find it on tf.wars. tbh the “cba” thing plays the main role in it.

Quoted from ilike2spin

[…]

In the current system you don’t need to beat good teams to be high up though, you need to play a lot and beat other teams who play a lot.

On a serious note. I wonder if anyone other than us three has read this thread.

I’d move away from the elo points system, and simple make it to move above a team you have to either A, Beat them, or B, Beat a team higher on the ladder than them.

Rules would need to be put in place to stop teams just refusing challenges to maintain their position e.g. they can only refuse 3 challenges from teams below their position (within x amount of places) within a 28 day period, without penalty (e.g. loss 5 positions on ladder).

If a bastardised elo system is used, large points changes should only happen if teams at the top are beaten by teams at the bottom, teams close on the ladder should have minimal points changes.

Also I think 4 people have read this now, although one probably shouldn’t have bothered